


And Indeed Things Sweeter Than Honey

by Solshine



Series: The Mistress [2]
Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Attempted Murder, F/M, Failed Seduction, Goblin King tantrums, Political diplomacy, The working title of this story was "Jareth tries to neg Sarah and it goes so badly for him", but not really, jareth isn't as smooth or cunning as he thinks he is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 05:51:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11822553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solshine/pseuds/Solshine
Summary: Sarah Williams's kingdom is as great, and entirely surrounding Jareth's, and she has the love and loyalty of half of his subjects.  Considering she pulled his castle down around his ears the first time they met, war seems inevitable. Jareth  can handle this; he's dealt with threats to his throne before.  The thing is, none of them were quite like Sarah.





	And Indeed Things Sweeter Than Honey

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to break myself out of a rut with some self indulgent emotion. "Ansley," I said, "Have you ever noticed that the best parts of Labyrinth are the ones where Jareth looks like he's about to cry?" "Why yes Ansley," I replied, "I have. I should write a whole story exploiting that." And so I did.
> 
> A few well-read readers noticed the classical reference in the title of the first fic to which this is a sequel. I should note that this title is not a continuation of that quote – just a continuation of the sentiment. :)

The Goblin King sits at the dressing table in his royal wardrobe, surveying an assortment of small pots and tapping his chin with a long-handled brush.

“But what's her title?” he asks the fox standing at parade rest beside his chair. “Her honorific? What's she calling herself, for gods’ sakes?” Some goblins scuttle in, bearing two different pairs of high heeled boots. Jareth points to one. “Those.”

“I do not believe she has declared a title,” says Didymus. “The citizens are starting to call her the Mistress. ‘Thy Ladyship’ seems safe.”

“Excellent.” He selects a pot and opens it to the shimmering paint inside. ‘Her Ladyship’ is no ‘Her Majesty.’ He still has that. Does one bow to a Ladyship, even in her own realm? He thinks not. An incline of the head, perhaps. Certainly no kneeling. He smiles smugly to himself. Mistress! The sort of thing one calls the landlady of a lodging house, not the ruler of a realm.

“She is expecting thee,” comes the voice near his knee.

The smile disappears and Jareth looks sharply toward Didymus, the brush still hanging in midair from the sweep he was painting over his eye.

Didymus answers his frown as though it were a question. “The goblins are talkative.”

“ _My_ goblins,” Jareth snarls.

“A few of them make their homes in the Labyrinth rather than in the City,” Didymus replies, “but they are nearly all fond of her.”

“And you?” counters Jareth. “Where does your loyalty lie?” He is met with only a cool stare from the knight. It's a conversation they have had before, and Didymus does not believe in stating things twice for the sake of Jareth's pride or bad mood. “It's a valid concern, Sir Knight,” Jareth says, narrowing his eyes. “When she challenges me for my kingdom, whose force will you fight in?” 

“His Majesty is unusually inclined to make assumptions, considering how readily he counsels others against it,” Didymus says archly. Jareth ignores that.

“You were ready enough to fight against my guard last time.”

“If my brother Ludo asks I join the fight, I shall do so. Otherwise, I shall stay well out of it.”

“Not like you.”

“I owe my knighthood to thee,” Didymus answers, “but I am a citizen of Her Ladyship’s Labyrinth. And she is my friend,” he adds gently. Jareth scowls at his mirror. “A sacred bond.”

Jareth pulls his boots on and stands with a huff. “My blue cape,” he demands of the goblins, who disappear in search of it. Glamours are well and good for audiences with mortal humans, but physical garments are best when dealing with other wielders of magic. Wouldn't do to have them fail and appear before another head of state in one’s pajamas.

Mistress of the Labyrinth. An innocuous title. It's always possible she doesn't understand the position she's acquired or the extent of her power. _My will is as strong as yours…_ Regardless, his best shot is to get her off balance and keep her there, establish a status quo that favors him. Her expecting him is not ideal, but he can work with it--anticipation and all. 

The goblins bring his cape and he swirls it onto his shoulders.

“Time to visit the Mistress of the Labyrinth, then.”

\---

She is radiant.

He is wearing his third finest (need to impress, but not to imply that this meeting is particularly important) and she is arrayed in rags, but he feels outstripped and outshone and outranked in every way. She wears a garland of tattered wildflowers in her long, tangled hair, dusting yellow pollen onto her shoulders and dropping faded petals on the wind. Her clothes are torn and stained and her hems caked with red mud, and the stitching is fraying away from her right suede moccasin, which is nearly at his eye level, perched as she is on the high outer wall of the Labyrinth. He cannot take his eyes off of her.

He drops his gaze to incline his head, a deeper bow than he’d intended with how far he must tip his head back to see her. “Good evening.”

“Good evening,” she greets in reply. “I think we are long overdue for a conversation.”

She drops lightly down off the wall and stands facing him. On her feet, she is shorter than him, although he is dismayed to see it is not by much. If it were not for the heels on his boots, he would only have a couple of inches on her. And she carries herself long and graceful, so that he has to remind himself of the handsbreadth advantage he does have on her in her soft shoes.

“You have grown even more beautiful than crystals could hope to prepare me for,” he says. It's true, but he adds a honeyed tone and a twist to his smile that shields his nakedness, turns the words into flattery.

She only bends and picks something up off the ground. It's a small watering can, peeling paint and flaking rust at the edges.

“Saline,” she explains, “for the watcher moss. Walk with me.” It isn't a request.

He scoffs in his head at her performing labor, however slight, during a diplomatic meeting. A laboring liege, is she? Perhaps he can turn that to his advantage.

“You have been busy in the years since our last meeting,” he says as they begin to walk along the shimmering stone corridor.

“Yes,” she says simply.

“I had hoped,” he chides gently, “that my measure of trust in allowing you to return to the Labyrinth after you left my kingdom in such… disarray”--not in pieces, do not allow her that much power--“would be rewarded with the courtesy of a visit.”

Sarah laughs. “Trust?” she says. “Disarray? I didn't leave your guest room a mess, your Majesty. That was a defeat. Let us call things what they are.”

“A mortal skill I fear I have never possessed,” he says, “calling things what they are.” 

His expression grants polite, faintly amused differing of opinion, as though they are only discussing the contested outcome of a croquet game. But she refuses to be shamed for the damage from her win, and speaks of it in military terms. Jareth’s teeth are grinding.

They approach a growth on the sparkling wall that bends its eyestalks to see them as they draw close. Sarah lifts her watering can and sprinkles the moss, which blinks happily and burbles from unseen mouths. Sarah smiles at it. For how much he disdained the watering can before, now he envies her something to do with his hands. He looks away from her smile and joins his hands behind his back.

“You’re good with the Labyrinth and its odder denizens,” he says. “They have not had anyone to take such notice or care of them for some time.” Cast her as the gardener, then; flatter her nurturing of the place and leave her content with its care, or dismiss her acquisition as something he is happy to be rid of. She nods and moves on from the closely-watching moss.

“Hoggle said something similar when I was younger,” she says. “About how it isn't under anyone’s command. At first I just thought, really, about how it wasn’t yours to throw me out of. But then… well, obviously my ambitions have grown.” Her tone is harmless, and she bears a small smile, but she turns to him and her dark eyes flash with steel--eyes deep and wild and unquestionably no longer mortal even if they’re still so human, eyes unquestionably _equal._

“Obviously,” smiles Jareth, his gut growing cold.

\---

“She knows her power as well as her own hands,” he snarls at the walls of his chambers. She is undeceived--undeceivable. His posturing means less than nothing to her. Jareth growls and upends a table, scattering a bowl of fruit and sending trinkets clattering across the stone floor. It is not nearly as satisfying as he would like. 

It isn’t much of a kingdom, this city--an ignominious inheritance for a troublesome youngest son--but it’s _something,_ a throne, some little measure of power. Jareth buries his hands in his hair. He refuses to have it taken from him. He refuses to become nobody. He refuses to be deposited outside his own door like yesterday’s milk bottles, without title, without _magic_ \-- 

And what of his peers? What of the first fete of Underground nobility, when Sarah will be introduced as “Goblin Queen and Mistress of the Labyrinth,” and the lords and countesses and princes and queens he’s danced with and dined with and bedded snicker behind their hands and say “Someone finally kicked him off that little dirtheap of a demesne! How funny! Look, she’s even more of a rube than he!”

No, they wouldn’t say that. They wouldn’t be able to deny her value, no matter how much they wanted to. They’d say “She deserves it more than he ever did.” They’d say “Maybe she’ll actually make something of that anthill.”

Or perhaps…

He thinks of her, sitting on that wall, her hair blowing in the wind.

Perhaps instead, when Sarah is introduced as the new Goblin Queen, they might say “The King has made an alliance greater than any we expected. These two we will have to be careful of.”

There is more than one way, after all, to handle a political challenger with grace.

Her skin shimmering, her mocassined foot swinging gently before his eyes, a tiny, knowing smile on her pink lips. _Obviously, my ambitions have grown._

He sits down at his desk and takes out a leaf of paper to start a letter.

 

\---

He preps the castle for a seduction--a real one, in the old style. Humans have never learned this art in quite the way immortals play it--and Sarah may have acquired many new expertises since she was fully mortal, but he doesn’t think this is one of them. 

Vases drip with roses, cream and the deep red-black of poisoned blood. The windows are draped with heavy velvet, the fire in the dining room banked high enough to consume a small forest of perfumed wood in its leaping orange flames, but certain to crumble into low, smouldering embers by the right point in the evening. 

He wears hose and an airy, half-open shirt; gently, gently, this is not the glittering prince-at-the-ball fantasy of a teenager. But there is gunmetal silver on his eyes, and a dusting of winking gold on his cheekbones. He does have excellent cheekbones after all.

Dusk falls. 

His guest arrives exactly on time, which is either a human sign of respect and interest, or an immortal power play, he can't decide. (He never forgets for a moment that she is both, twice as dangerous as either.)

He answers the door himself, having sent all the goblins away for the evening.

“"Good evening, your Majesty," says Sarah. She does not bow, or curtsy, only inclines her head, as though she thinks a Ladyship is on equal footing with a Majesty. Jareth inclines his head back to her. 

“Good evening, Sarah,” he replies. It doesn't matter. There will be no rank here tonight. 

Of course, he's never tried to seduce someone who looks like they just came from an afternoon of gardening. Unlike himself, the Mistress of the Labyrinth does not seem to have changed almost anything about her worn and filthy clothing, or possibly even washed her face. There's only one thing different.

“The shoes are new," he observes. Sarah looks down and lifts in the hem of her skirts as if to check. They’re a pair of battered, oversized leather work boots, caked in the glittering mud of the Labyrinth.

“Oh, yes. I dropped a shoe in the Bog this morning,” she says, wrinkling her nose, and then smiles, sticking a foot out as though she's proud of the grimy things. "Hoggle found these for me.”

“I see,” Jareth says. _Don't be jealous of the dwarf,_ he reminds himself.

He smiles charmingly. “Would you mind greatly leaving them by the door?” he says. She looks up at him. “You needn't remove your shoes, or anything else, if you don't wish to,” he adds, dialing up the charm of his smirk a little further. She raises one eyebrow, smirking back. “But,” he finishes in a low voice, “I hope you’ll wish to.”

“For the sake of your floors, of course,” she replies. 

“Of course,” he says.

She wiggles her feet out of the gardening boots-- wearing roughly knitted stockings underneath, as though she has borrowed those as well--and pads into the castle ahead of his outstretched arm.

She is looking admiringly around at the stone architecture as she goes. “It is exactly what a fairy tale castle should be,” she proclaims, stopping to finger the fringe on a hanging tapestry. "I always regretted not getting to see more of it the first time.”

The first time when you were an invading force breaking down the door, he doesn't say.

"You could have come by anytime," he offers instead. "My home has always been open to you."

"Has it?” she challenges over her shoulder, and the way she meets Jareth’s eyes for a moment nearly makes his steps stumble. He's not sure if he is afraid he's shown his heart too much, or if he fears her taking his invitation to mean her and her army as well, but he is suddenly nervous in a way that will not do.

"Perhaps after dinner, I can give you a tour," he says in a low, sonorous voice. Yes, a tour – over the parapet in the moonlight, through chilly velvet-hung corridors by the light of a candelabra, and ending in the royal bedroom. Very good.

"I'd like that,” is all Sarah says, throwing him a smile.

"I'll make sure you do," he replies, feeling in command of the situation again. He leads her to the dining room and pulls out a chair for her at the end of the long, laden table. She clearly expects him to take a seat in the chair at the other end, but instead he pulls another chair out of the shadows of the dimly lit room and pushes it up to the other side of the corner. She laughs in surprise as he sits down, and he grins at her.

"This makes it so much easier to talk," he says. "And with as lovely as you're looking" – even under the mud, even with straw and wilted flower petals still clinging to her hair – "it would be a shame not to be able to see your face.”

It's an old chestnut of a move that features in at least three romance novels in Jareth’s own library, and which any member of his mother's court would've seen coming. But Sarah is not from any of those courts, has not read any of those novels. 

"I hope you like cornish hen," he says. She smiles. It's warm and genuine and not calculating at all. That should make him confident, but his heart almost stutters again.

He asks her about her work, the details of her presidence over her domain, and serves her himself from the plates he summons magically from the kitchen. She answers him frankly, hiding nothing, gesturing enthusiastically as she speaks on topics close to her heart. He learns more from her in an hour, over oysters and poached pears, that he could have in a year from a team of spies. Jareth, for his part, volunteers almost nothing. She does not accept food off his fork, but she laughingly permits him to steal from her plate. It's going very, very well.

There's only one thing that stands out from her seeming of innocence and naïveté: she hardly touches her wine.

When the plates are empty, Jareth rises from his chair and offers her a hand. “If you're still thirsty,” he says, “I have some champagne chilling in the sitting room.” He smiles genteelly. “And then perhaps that tour.”

She takes his hand, and stands.

"Perhaps," she says.

In the sitting room, the fire has broken down to low flames and red glowing logs. The incense on the fire suffuses the room with amber and orchid. Sarah sinks into a plush chair, and sits admiring the fire, while Jareth remains in the doorway for a moment, admiring her.

"I know what you're doing," she says into the silence.

It shouldn't freeze his pulse. He hasn't been coy tonight about his purposes. Of course she knows she's being seduced. He reorients himself, and stalks slowly toward her. He doesn't speak until he stands right next to her chair and rests his fingertips lightly on the chair arm.

“And what,” he purrs, “am I doing?”

Sarah spares him only a glance, and it's so dismissive that it's like walking into a wall. 

"If I thought for a moment it was sincere," she murmurs to the fire. She sighs, and then she turns to look squarely up at him and this is worse. Her eyes are not warm any longer.

"But it's not," she says. "It's just you trying to control everything you see, Pulling everything into your game, your domain. Trying to make everything and everyone else one of your toys, like a crystal ball to be played with." Jareth can't breathe. She does not break his gaze. "But you don't control the Labyrinth anymore, Jareth," she says. "And you don't control me.”

He schools his expression as best he can, but he is sure she can feel his panic. She's so close, she must see it on every inch of his face. They look at each other for a few long moments.

"I'll just get that champagne," he says, turning away. He hears her sigh again behind him.

"Yes, of course."

He stands in the corner over the champagne in its bucket of ice, trying to compose himself. _You don't control the Labyrinth anymore, Jareth. And you don't control me._ Your kingdom is shrinking, Jareth. Your power is failing, and soon it will be gone, she might as well have said. I will take it from you. It isn't going to work, the whole plan. Pulling her into his influence, merging their kingdoms, it was never going to work, he was never winning even for a moment. He was foolish to think he was. If she had been anyone else he would have never have assumed she was fooled, but he'd blinded himself willingly because she was human, because she was _Sarah_ and he had wanted--

If she wasn't Sarah, and this gambit failed with some other enemy, what would he do?

His eyes fall on the bottle of champagne in front of him.

He keeps poison with his glassware, of course. It's the simplest thing in the world to palm a tiny vial as he takes out the flutes, and put a couple drops, odorless, colorless, tasteless, in the bottom of one.

Sarah is speaking again, her tone once more light and unbothered as though it had never been otherwise. "By the way, I must ask that you quit banishing people to Didymus’s bog. He really hasn't got anywhere to put them. We’re working on populating it with creatures that don't mind the smell, and it's very disruptive having banished goblins dropping in on peoples’ roofs. Besides that I don't have any way of knowing if they've commuted actual crimes, or if you're just being petty like you were with Hoggle.”

“I'll see what I can do,” he mumbles without really thinking about it. What _can_ he do? He fiddles with the cork, his mind in a whirl. She will march on his city, otherwise. It is a guarantee. If not tomorrow, then someday. She is clever, and powerful, and she knows that she is and she knows that he cannot stand against her. He will be cast into the dark, alone, he will never see her again regardless and he has done many things more cold-blooded than this, he has done many things before that ran counter to his heart. 

He manages to uncork it and pours the champagne. His hands are shaking. Why should they? He has never been a person with shaking hands.

He sets down the bottle, though his fingers stay wrapped around its base so hard his knuckles creak. The bubbles rise identically in both flutes. Maybe, he thinks a little wildly, he will give Sarah his glass, and drink the one he poured for her. That would certainly solve all of his problems.

"Jareth?" says Sarah behind him. 

The only sound is the cracking of the fire.

"I think," Jareth says, in a calm voice without turning around, "you had better leave.”

Sarah does not respond. He stands facing the wall as, after a moment, she stands, and walks from the room, and he remains there long after he hears the distant echo of the front door of the castle swinging closed.

\---

Jareth wakes on top of his bedclothes, still dressed in his clothes from the night before, and his first thought in his mind is that he is awaiting a declaration of war.

If it had been any fae ruler he'd dismissed so rudely, the declaration would have been waiting in immaculate calligraphy with his breakfast. Jareth knows already that it won't be. He is fairly sure he's expecting to simply be invaded one day by a tidal wave of destruction, toppling walls and tearing up paving stones.

He cannot wait for that.

Before he hardly knows what he's doing, he is jamming his feet into boots and storming out his front door, scattering goblins as he goes. 

He steps between the shadows and arrives outside of the hedge maze. He can feel her power within, but the tall green wall before him has no openings in sight.

“I require an audience with the Mistress of the Labyrinth!” he demands of no one. After a long moment, the hedge shivers and parts.

On the other side, Sarah straightens from her work trimming a low shrub and wipes her forehead with a sleeve. She does not look smug or defiant. She looks tired, and a little annoyed.

“What, Jareth?”

"I will not be toyed with in this manner," he snaps. Immediately her shoulders pull back and her eyes sharpen dangerously.

“Toyed--”

“Yes!” he snarls. “You accuse me of playing games with _you_ , yet you establish a kingdom _surrounding_ mine and sit having your little staring contest for _years_ \--”

“I've hardly been _sitting_ \--”

“No,” he sneers, “you've been preparing, haven't you--”

“--and if there's been a staring contest, I sure as hell haven't been the only one staring,” she all but shouts. “Is that what this all has been about? That I made you _blink_ first?”

“I will not be mocked,” he fires back, “by-- by a human!” She drops her pruning shears onto the ground with a clatter. Her anger is terrible, telegraphed in every rigid line of her body, her clenched fists. He wonders somewhere in the back of his head if she might actually take a swing at him. “Anyone else might have despised me, but they would have at least treated me like a king up until the moment they wrested me from my throne!”

“You’ve forgotten, Jareth,” Sarah spits, her eyes flashing. Oh. It's coming next. He can feel it before it even leaves her lips. “You have no power--”

He flinches back from the words as from a blow. 

He hates it, but he can't help it. Indeed, if she’d actually struck him, he probably would have taken it stonefaced. Instead, he stands here frozen in recoil, his face turned from her, all the heat of his own anger frozen in a moment. She has not finished the sentence.

He prizes open his eyes and looks at Sarah. She is staring back with something hard to define in her dark, wild, powerful eyes, surprised at his movement, wary, like he is something dangerous, or maybe something breakable. Jareth lowers his hand that he finds he had raised between them in defense.

“I know that,” he says. His voice is more hoarse than it should be. “I haven't forgotten. You think I've forgotten?” 

They are both silent for a moment. He gathers his wits and breathes in through his nose, his lips pressed tight together, the air feeling too thin in his lungs. 

“The first time,” he says, “I thought I was the fox and you thought you were the rabbit, and we were both wrong even then.” He licks his lips. “And now?” 

He takes a step back (to gesture with an outspread arm to her Labyrinth, but it is also a good excuse to lengthen the distance between himself and Sarah, whose gaze is getting keener and more understanding in a way he doesn't like). Jareth huffs a little bitter laugh. “Your kingdom is as great,” he says with what really isn't a smile at all. “Greater.” 

Her eyes are watching him. They are so green, and so deep, like the darkest shadows in ancient forests that have grown so long and lush that even noon feels like twilight. They know everything he has ever tried to hide from her.

He swallows. He takes another step back. “Your power then shone like a lantern,” he says. “That human power of creation and imagination. Now…” He falters, but then continues. “Now it shines like a bonfire, like a sun.” It does. It will blind him in a minute. “It used to be enthralling,”Jareth tells her. “Now it is terrible.” 

He wants to look away from her eyes, but he doesn't. Another step back. He doesn't know how his voice got so raspy. “You have grown so beautiful that it hurts to look at you.”

They are silent for a while, looking at each other.

“I think,” says Sarah, her voice quiet, “that was the first time I've ever heard you speak with honesty.”

“The second time,” he corrects, something closer to a smile twitching across his face briefly. “Thirteenth hours bring it out in me.”

“You know, Aboveground they say ‘eleventh hour,’” she says thoughtfully. “The first time I heard someone say that after I ran, I remember thinking for a second it was a silly thing to say--plenty could happen before the strike of thirteen.” 

He says nothing. Sarah tilts her head and considers him. “Speak to me with honesty, Jareth,” she says. “What has all this been about? What do you want? I’ve only ever done you that courtesy.”

“Honesty is not courtesy in this world, you ridiculous, human girl!” bursts Jareth, exasperated. “It is foolishness, it is suicide. It is…” 

He stops. Blinks hard at her. Catches his breath. She waits. 

“It is all you will accept,” he finishes tiredly. He feels wrung out, emptied. “Fine.” 

With effort, he steps forward again. She watches him. She is merciless. She is so beautiful. 

Jareth drops to his knees, his arms slack at his sides, his face upturned to her. Sarah actually gasps.

“Liege of the Labyrinth, I entreat you,” he says. His voice is rough and unmusical. “My kingdom, my domain, is so small. A dusty pile of bricks. Dreams, desires, wishes. You have more than this--you have creation. It is not worth your notice.” He takes an unsteady breath. “Do not take it from me,” he says. He may be begging, but his jaw is hard and his back is straight. He can feel her, though, reading his soul through his eyes. “Do not send me away from there in shame.”

“Is that why you watched me so long?” she says, frowning. “You thought me a threat to your throne?”

He wets his lips. Honesty. “No,” he replies. “That is not why I watched you.” 

He sees her sun-browned throat work in a swallow at that. 

“That is not worth your notice either,” he says quickly. “Ignore it. Ignore me. I will not challenge you. My armies could not defeat you the first time, and now I think my own soldiers would fight on your side, you are so beloved.” He wets his lips again. “To them,” he finishes lamely, then ruins it by adding, “I think I could not even begrudge them that, precious thing.”

Sarah shakes her head. She looks almost pained. “Jareth, get up.”

“Have you not yet had to take a supplicant?” he asks. “You will have to learn. You must deny or grant their request before you ask them to rise.”

“Rise, rise,” she says impatiently, shaking her head harder, the trailing end of her long hair switching back and forth with the movement. “I'm not going to… to _depose_ you, Jareth.” 

As simple as that. 

She holds out her hands. He tries not to let his heart bang too hard against his chest when he takes them and she helps him to his feet. “Not everyone with power just uses it to get more,” she says as her hands slip free of his again.

Yes they do. They all do, mortal and immortal alike. She is exceptional, an anomaly, all the more so that she even thinks she isn't. He doesn't say this.

“I couldn't throw you out, for goodness’ sake,” she is saying.

“You certainly could,” he replies.

“No, I mean I… I wouldn't. You're… you're the Goblin King!” She smiles and shakes her head. “I may have a great imagination, but I can't imagine the Castle Beyond the Goblin City without you in it.”

They stand before each other. He thinks his ribs will break from the force of everything he is trying to fit behind them. She is suddenly smirking.

“You know,” she says, eyes sparkling, “I had such a crush on you when I was a kid.”

That's it? It's over? No distrust, no careful diplomacies? He should know better than to believe otherwise of her, but he should also know better than to be so trusting. She should know better.

“I almost murdered you last night,” he blurts before he realizes what he's about to say. Sarah just lifts her eyebrows.

“Did you?” she says. “You don't say.” She seems more… amused than anything? Jareth is baffled. Does she not believe him?

“I did,” he finds himself insisting, ridiculously. “Poison.”

“You just said you almost did,” she corrects. She is smiling in earnest now. “And… Well, anyway, I forgave Hoggle for poisoning me. I guess I can forgive you too.”

He stares at her, at her smile, disbelieving, his chest hurting inexplicably.

“You're not going to last five minutes in Underground politics,” he says. Yes, she will.

Her smile broadens. The pain in his chest increases. “You’ll have to teach me,” she says. No, he won’t. 

Sarah tilts her head and looks at him for a moment, considering him by some standard he can't even begin to guess at. Her lips are pink and her hands are small and the morning light glints in her hair like she has strands of tinsel caught in it, and she is easily the most terrifying thing he's ever seen. He thinks to himself that for this, he could be sincere.

She bends and picks up her shears, still smiling. "Well, your Majesty, as long as you're here, I have some flower bulbs that need brought up from the lower gardens. Let's go." It isn't a question.

He goes.


End file.
